By Graham Nicholls (auth.)
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Additional resources for Measure for Measure: Text and Performance
Example text
The speech in fact is an address to life. In its length and stateliness it provides a lower pitch of emotional intensity than either the preceding or ensuing scene, but in terms of plot and the intermingling relations of Isabella, Claudio and Angelo it is irrelevant. We must look to the characterisation of the Duke and its place in his development for its justification. In his earlier scenes we have encountered a kindly but withdrawn and ineffectual ruler, nervously wishing to remain on hand to check on Angelo's behaviour.
To dismiss, as some critics suggest, the term 'problem play' as unhelpful does not mean that Measure for Measure does not contain problems. An over-simplified view of the play on the stage or in the study after all would be to see the world like an Angelo or an Isabella rather than to share Shakespeare's eschewal of easy solutions and judgements. The world of Measure for Measure is one in which a deputising ruler imposes a rigid framework of justice into which human nature is required to fit; when the ruler himself returns at the end of the play, his own judgements reflect a grey world of confusing ambiguities.
Our one glimpse of Angelo before the finale shows a dispirited nervous figure who contrasts both with his earlier role of bright-eyed legal eagle and with the rejuvenated Duke. But after this masterly build-up the finale is not in fact the standard meting-out ofrewards and punishments: the Duke's judgements are partial and subjectively arrived at, albeit based on a kind of rough justice. ' Shakespeare has deliberately led us to expect a different kind of conclusion: in place ofthe punishments of a satiricalJonsonian comedy we are given one more fitting the ambiguous, messy world of tragi-comedy.